62. Essential hotkey shortcuts for Vista

Here's a quick list of some essential hotkeys that will make working with Vista much faster:

WIN+ (1-10): corresponds to the first ten items in the quicklaunch bar. This means that WIN+1 will minimize everything to desktop, which is handy.

WIN+SPACE: brings the Vista sidebar to the front.

WIN+G: Cycle through Sidebar gadgets

WINKEY+TAB: Flip 3D interface

CTRL+WINKEY+TAB: persistent Flip 3D

ALT+TAB: Jump between all open windows quickly, or back and forth between the last two accessed.

ALT+Print Screen: Take a screen capture of just the window in focus (the active window), as opposed to the entire desktop.

We can't forget the good old standby's: CTRL+A: select all, CTRL+C: copy, CTRL+V: paste... it's amazing how these three with ALT+Tab can accelerate data manipulation between different windows or documents. Note that most of Windows XP keyboard shortcuts continue to apply in Windows Vista. These are just some of the new ones unique to the OS. For Microsoft's complete list of Vista keyboard shortcuts, go to this page at Microsoft.com

63. Return the Run command to the start menu

If you find you really can't live without the Windows XP style 'run' command on the start menu, it's easy enough to restore.

To make the 'run' command appear on the start menu:

Right click the 'start' menu and choose 'properties.' Choose the 'start menu' tab.

Click the 'customize' button.

Scroll down until you find the option titled 'run command' and check it. Hit 'ok'.

64. Using the new 'resource overview' monitor in Windows Vista

The Windows performance monitor has received a considerable facelift with the release of Vista, and now offers a whole host of monitoring information about your computer, once you've learned how to configure it for easy use. The most obvious and useful new feature is the resource overview window. This screen handily centralizes your CPU, memory, network and hard disk % at use information and allows you to track which files and processes are using your system resources in real-time. Let's take a look at how to use it.

To open the resource overview screen:

Open the 'start' menu and type 'monitor' in the search box and hit Enter.

Welcome to the new and improved resource overview screen. As you can see, the four windows correspond to the four major hardware areas of your system, and show you essentially how hard they are working over the last 60 seconds of time. Now, let's dig a little deeper.

If you double click on any of the four displays, you'll notice that the corresponding heading on the lower part of the screen will expand, offering you more information. For the CPU, we can see exactly which processes have been taking up CPU time over the last minute, and what percentage. For the hard drive, the files that have been read from and written to and how much. For the network which processes are accessing network connections and how much data are they transferring (very useful for identifying possible spyware/trojan virus problems), and for the memory you can see how much memory each running process is consuming and what percentage of that can be shared with other applications or is fully reserved. All-in-all a very useful overview of the activities of your entire computer system right at your fingertips.